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Dessert

Castle Pudding

A butter, sugar, flour, and lemon rind cake baked at 400°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Castle Pudding

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Castle Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Beat in the egg until the mixture is light and creamy.

  3. Sift the flour and baking powder together, add the grated lemon rind, and stir lightly in.

Bake and serve

  1. Fill buttered darioles or molds three parts full and bake at 400°F (200°C) for twenty minutes.

  2. Turn out and serve with wine or jam sauce.

Steaming option

  1. For steaming, omit the lemon rind and steam for fifty minutes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Provides structure and richness as the batter sets during cooking.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the pudding tender and rich.
Castor sugar
Creamed with butter to trap air, and adds sweetness and a fine texture.
Flour
Forms the structure of the pudding as it sets.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the pudding rise.

The step that matters

Stir the flour in lightly. Once flour meets liquid, gluten begins to form. Overmixing develops it too much, making the pudding tough and dense instead of light.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, sugar, flour):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, sugar, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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